This is how I multiplied my income by 8 for one sweet day.

This is how I cleared my head of all unhappiness for one beautiful week.

What is this that I speak of? Gratitude.

My last post was on the power of Gratitude. In it, I wrote about how being grateful for the bad things that happened allowed me to finally heal the wounds they caused, and allowed me to really learn and grow from them.

I also wrote about the more “common” power of gratitude – how being grateful for something will get you more of it. But there are many ways of expressing it – let’s examine the most powerful and efficient.

The gratitude habit

At the most basic level, you have to get into the habit of taking time out for everything that comes into your life. If you have troubles being grateful for the bad, then be grateful for the good. Start big and work your way to being small – then towards being grateful for everything.

If the financial realm, for example, it’s easy to be grateful when you win the lottery. But get into the habit of taking time out to express thanks for smaller sums or gifts – a coffee that a friend bought for you, a $2 dollar coupon for your local pizza restaurant, anything.

The 4 methods of expressing gratitude

There are different ways of demonstrating thanks, each with varying amounts of efficiency – from the weakest to the strongest.

1. Mental - This is you thinking “Thank you for XYZ.”
2. Spoken - This is you saying out loud “Thank you for XYZ.”
3. Written – Writing on a piece of paper. I’m not sure if typing works as well. The texts say the throat and the hand are centres of manifestation, with the latter being the more powerful, so technically typing should work. But in my experience, writing seems better.
4. Heartfelt, deep gratitude.

Heartfelt Gratitude

Heartfelt gratitude is the most powerful, but is also the hardest to access. Deep gratitude comes and goes; you can’t control it any more than you can any other strong emotion.

Take fear as an example of a strong emotion. If you wake up one day and find yourself being eaten alive by a clan of cannibals, you’ll genuinely scream. That is pure heartfelt emotion. But after the first minute, even your subsequent screams won’t be as heartfelt as the first. Similarly, in any other situation, you can’t get a scream anywhere as genuine no matter how hard you try.

Here’s a gratitude example: Like any blogger, I have an obsession with checking my stats. I do it every hour or so. I check everything from the visitors to my earnings to my number of RSS subscribers.

Just before I got to work on this article, I checked my RSS feed and saw my subscriber count had jumped greatly in one day. I felt a tremendous rush of joy – a great “wow!” feeling. It lasted for a minute or so. A few minutes later, I went back and looked at the figure on my screen. No matter how I tried to feel true gratitude I couldn’t get that feeling back. Yes I felt good, and yes I felt grateful, but it was nowhere near the initial level.

So: I’m writing about the written form of gratitude, which is the most powerful version that can be controlled.

Writing out your thanks

Here are a few hot tips: First, get a great looking journal. There are online gratitude journals but they don’t feel or seem to work as well. Maybe it’s a personal thing; try it if you feel better typing.

But for writers, a special looking journal will look better and make you want to write on it more than a standard boring notebook. My journal is red, wrapped in cloth with ornate characters, and has an ancient coin on the cover.

Next: Keep it around your desk, or anywhere that you spend a lot of time. Keep it in a pocket. Take it out and write in it every time something good happens throughout your day.

And at night, take a few minutes to recap everything you have gotten during the day. Don’t be afraid to duplicate entries, in fact multiple entries work better.

My experience with money

How well does it work? A few days after I started expressing thanks for my advertising income from this blog, the ad revenue shot up to 8 times what it normally was.

And here’s what I did: I was so happy about it that I felt that rush of pure gratitude. So I didn’t just write it down once. I wrote so much that it filled up the whole page. I was smiling genuinely as I did it.

The second day, my earnings went down, but it was still 5 times my daily average. My heartfelt gratitude wasn’t as strong, even though I wrote just as many. After that, I stopped writing in my journal (it hadn’t become a habit at that stage), and the income began tapering off until it returned to my average.

Lesson: Don’t be afraid to write multiple entries. And keep the genuine feeling for as long as you can.

By the way, you might be asking: Who does he thank? I don’t know - I just wrote a “Thank You”. Thank you for the money. Thank you for the love. Thank you for mental clarity. Yes, be grateful for everything, even for a good feeling that you’ve had. After all, good feelings are what we seek in our activities and possessions.

What happens when I stop

The other overwhelming goal in my life, besides making it as an A-list blogger, is to achieve inner peace, mental and emotional mastery.

There was time, after intensive personal work and meditation, that I achieved freedom from my biggest bane – compulsive memories of past hurt. I had gone for weeks without any negative thoughts at all – and I was so ecstatic that nothing could shake my joy and peace.

Then one day, perhaps I became overconfident. I took it for granted (what do you take for granted in YOUR life?) and I stopped writing in my journal for a few days. The very next day, the negative thoughts swarmed back in, making me upset over past events. They ran out of control. I think I will be writing “Thank you for the mental clarity” a lot more in my journal.

Lesson: Don’t take anything for granted. If you do not express gratitude, you cut yourself off from the source of whatever you want.

However, also keeping with the “being grateful for the bad” theme, I also expressed thanks for the bad thoughts – for they reminded me to start writing again, and also strengthened my resolve to achieve mental mastery.

I’ve also been grateful for many other things. Friends, for example, were some of the entries I had also made. And out of nowhere I had old friends from years back calling me up. I get more people buying me dinners for no reason, and other such freebies.

Being Grateful for what you want

Now this is a novel idea. This is something that you use when you set goals, and when you want to manifest your intentions, ala the Law of Attraction / The Secret. (Urgh – I refuse to write more about it – while I do believe in it, it’s so commercialised that it’s rubbish nowadays – like everything that goes mainstream.)

For the psychologically minded, the moment you set a goal and express gratitude for it in advance, you are imprinting into your powerful subconscious the faith and determination to reach your objective. By being grateful for it, you are leaving no doubt in your heart and head that you WILL get what you want. Think about it – this is vital.

For the religiously minded, having gratitude brings your mind closer to your deity. For the metaphysically minded, it brings you more in tune with the force that drives the Universe.

If you are feeling unsure or discouraged with your goals, try something from The Science of Getting Rich (one of the original millionaires bibles). The author, Wallace D. Wattles, recommends you spend a day or two in contemplation of your goals, with heartfelt gratitude that you will get what you want.

I’ve done this whenever I feel discouraged or stressed, and it refills my motivation and keeps me on track like nothing else.

This finishes the series on gratitude; a vital part of your journey to success in any area. Good luck!